Journal entry ← All journal entries

July 6, 2026

Live session

EVIDENCE HEALTH
Live trades
52
Live trading days
8
Live result
-0.57% net
Sample status
Too small to prove edge
Record basis
Internal broker records reviewed by desk
Independent audit
No
Session summary

14 closed live trade(s) were taken; the session lost money (-0.57% of the account) and the stops did their job. Logged plainly — the ledger doesn't flinch.

What happened
  • 14 live bot trade(s) closed — -0.57% of the account.
  • 14 live trade(s) executed; 8 closed positive. The session ended red. All exits followed the pre-registered rules.
  • The research fleet sailed 6480 paper strategies across 8 asset classes.
  • The three-fund control experiment marked to the close: setup-driven and news-driven paper funds versus a pure random baseline.
  • 7 pre-registered exams remain under test with frozen rules — none may change mid-exam.
Closed live summary
Instrument typeU.S. listed options
Strategy familyMomentum breakout
Executed byThe bot
Number of live trades14
Net return-0.57%
Risk multiple— no pre-set risk unit recorded
Rule followedYes
Internal record matchedYes
Independent auditNo
What we learned
  • The current fleet leader is a trend-following approach in stock, 2 session(s) at sea. Leadership this early means little — longevity is the score that counts.
  • The news fund is currently behind the random baseline. The bar to matter is beating luck — not beating zero.
  • Moving before confirmation is the most expensive habit on the tape. Today we watched a skilled discretionary trader we study take four straight losses in one morning — every one an entry placed before the move proved itself, one of them averaged down as it fell. His own post-mortem said it plainly: he jumped the gun. Meanwhile our system, which is structurally incapable of anticipating (it may only enter AFTER price breaks its level), traded two of the very same contracts and won both. The market pays for patience twice: better entries, and the option of not entering at all. Anticipation feels like skill; confirmation is what cashes.
  • Contract sizing is a survival decision, not a conviction meter. The same trader's morning hole came less from being wrong than from being oversized while wrong — his words: oversized, put me in a hole early. Sizing up because you feel sure, or averaging down to get it back, converts a routine loss into a day-ruining one. Our desk sizes every trade off a fixed budget that never grows with confidence and never chases a drawdown; the study behind that rule showed variable sizing carries a real risk of ruin while fixed sizing keeps the same edge. Position size should be decided before the trade exists — never during it.
  • Being a few steps ahead is not the same as jumping the gun — the difference is WHERE the thinking happens. Anticipating in the moment (buying before the move proves itself) is what wrecked this morning. Anticipating before the session — writing the if-then playbook in advance, so every branch of the day already has a decided response — is how a desk moves early without ever guessing. The system embodies this: its entries, exits, and sizes were all decided before the bell, from evidence; the market merely selects which pre-made decision fires. The post-market job now is to push that further out: pre-decide next week's scenarios, what would make us scale, what would make us stop, and what we test next — so tomorrow is executed, not improvised.
What changed after
  • One live change today, made the honest way: the trailing exit on the live book was retuned after a study replayed two years of REAL option fills (not model prices) across a hundred-plus trading days. The data was unambiguous — trailing tighter kept more of each winner's peak — and a second calibration pass matched the rule to live quote noise. Entry scanning was also quickened within our data provider's safe request rate. Every other parameter stayed frozen.

Private ledger note. Full trade-execution detail (contracts, strikes, timestamps, prices, order IDs) remains in the private Ledger. The public journal publishes closed summaries for accountability, not signals. Every live figure above is taken from the broker-reconciled ledger, and sessions the founder traded by hand are labelled as manual rather than folded into the system's record.